Family detective

By Nick Barratt

12:01AM GMT 10 Nov 2006

The surname Palin seems to first appear in English records after the Norman Conquest, and can be linked to the location Pavilly, near Seine Maritime in Normandy. In the 1881 census, the largest concentration of families is in the north-west around Cheshire. Today they are found across England and Wales. Clearly the Palins liked to move around.Michael Palin is one of Britain's best-loved entertainers.

From Monty Python to Ripping Yarns, he has shown himself to be a comic actor of the highest order, while his travel documentaries have delighted a massive BBC audience. Whether journeying from Pole to Pole, around the Equator, across the Sahara or into the Himalayas, he injects his own unique blend of enthusiasm and humour into proceedings. But he is no stranger to controversy: the film Monty Python's Life of Brian was called blasphemous and banned in parts of Britain on its release in 1979.

Are there any clues to his career lurking in his family background?

Who is he related to?

Michael Edward Palin was born in Sheffield in 1943, the son of Edward Moreton Palin and his wife, Mary Rachel Lockhart Ovey. They married in Oxford in 1930, although Edward was working as a civil engineer in Fakenham, Norfolk, at the time. It is clear that both sides of the family were well-connected. Mary's father, Richard Lockhart Ovey, obtained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, having been decorated with the Distinguished Service Order in 1916 during the First World War.

He was once Lord of the Manor of Turville St Albans in Buckinghamshire, so it is perhaps no surprise to find that his family is listed in Burke's Peerage under Ovey of Hernes, with proven descent going back to Thomas Ovey of Watlington, Oxfordshire, born in the late 16th century.

If anything, Edward's brother Sir Esmond Ovey can claim an even more glittering diplomatic career. Clearly, travel was in the blood: Sir Esmond seems to have covered more ground than his nephew, having served as an envoy to Mexico and ambassador to Moscow, Belgium, the Argentine Republic and Paraguay.

Travel was not restricted solely to Michael's maternal lineage. On his father's side of the family comes a rather intriguing 19th-century romance set in Switzerland and France. The story begins with the birth of Michael's great-grandmother, Brita Gallagher, around 1845 in Ireland. Tragedy struck Brita at an early age, when both her parents perished in the potato famine.

Orphaned, with only a label on her dress to identify her, she was sent to America in one of the infamous ''coffin ships", so called because of the high mortality rate among those on board. She was brought up by a rich spinster called Caroline Watson, and was then sent back to Europe to receive an education aged 16. She travelled for several years, before a chance encounter with an English academic called Edward Palin in a hotel in Switzerland. At the time, he was an Oxford Don at St John's College. Although there was a 17-year age gap, they were attracted to one another, but nothing came of it. According to his diary, he wistfully pondered on ''what might have been". But they kept in touch and in 1867, once she had reached the age of 21, they were married in Paris.

Edward was forced to give up his position in college but secured a living as the vicar of Linton, Herefordshire. The couple lived in some degree of comfort, bringing up their seven children with the help of a large domestic staff.

The pair had certainly done their fair share of travelling around and it seems that the wanderlust surfaced again three generations later.